I’ve written much on this site about the 20th anniversaries of events in Eastern Europe, as communism crumbled and the Iron Curtain was swept aside. But on the West Coast of the US, this winter marked the 20th anniversary of San Francisco’s deadly Loma Prieta earthquake.

This being SF, the anniversary was commemorated in an upbeat way with The Big Rumble: a week of events “designed to connect our communities with preparedness resources”. Raising awareness was the name of the game in a city where the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’.

So only two months later, when the famous sea lions of Fisherman’s Wharf departed en masse, Read More…

Even the biggest cynic has to admit that they give good Yule in Germany. From the spicy smell of hot Glühwein to the satisfying stodge of Stollen, Christmas in Deutschland is a treat for the eyes and the stomach.

1989 is a landmark year in modern world history. While China’s communist regime clamped down in Tiananmen Square, their western equivalents started to collapse. Some say the media ‘milked’ the Berlin Wall anniversary, or there was too much triumphalism; elsewhere professors ponder whether the impact on political philosophy of this ideological seachange should have been greater, given the scale of the unprecedented events.

Gil Scott-Heron said: “The revolution will not be televised”. In Germany, it was not only televised, it was eventually commoditised. Read More…

‘Corporate responsibility’ is a buzzword that the generation my grandmother belonged to never knew. And mine will hopefully never know the horror of a gas attack. Sometimes she told me about her father, who experienced this in the Great War and was never the same again. He was one of the lucky ones, only maimed by his experience. Others drowned on dry land as their lungs filled with fluid and their skin blistered.

Many a British schoolchild will have read Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, and it doesn’t take much to imagine the horror of finding yourself surrounded by this invisible poison. I remember the sense of nausea as, watching TV news in December 1984, I realised how many Indians must have died a similary grotesque death during the Bhopal incident and its aftermath. Read More…

Only this morning I was reading some European rail updates on the excellent The Man in Seat 61 website. I wanted to read about the forthcoming drop in journey time between London and Amsterdam by Eurostar and Thalys. But as I’ve been looking east this year, I noted with interest the high speed Russian link between Moscow and St Petersburg.

In a sinister example of synchronicity, only a few hours later I read about the bomb explosion on the very same line last night. It has very quickly been blamed on terrorism, reportedly due to very obvious clues like the sound of an explosion and a crater.

Likely suspects, according to the BBC, include militants from the North Caucus and pro-Nazi nationalists. It’s speculated that because of the regular business and political clientele on this train, it was a direct attack on the ruling class.

Whatever the results of the ensuing investigation into the darker corners of modern Russia, it’s sure to be shrouded in claim and counter claim. I’m currently reading Edward Lucas’ The New Cold War; despite its rather unsubtle bias and sometimes rhetorical language, it does raise worrying questions about the direction of this wounded bear.

In the early days of the Putin era, the 1999 bombing of Moscow apartment blocks shook the country. Chechen terrorists were implicated, and this is highly plausible. But controversy has surrounded these attacks, with some suggesting that a rattled population, looking for a strong leader and ready to ‘hit back’, was just what some elements wanted. Others have been more specific, and their allegations can easily be found on the internet.

The latest incident, the second on this line in as many years, will do nothing for the idea of relocating some governmental departments to St Petersburg – or Russian tourism. Any military ramifications in this volatile region remain to be seen.

Putin called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. I heard a holidaying Russian, watching this November’s Berlin Wall celebrations in a kebab shop near the Brandenburg Gate, tell a Dutch man at the next table that “This is not a cause for celebration in our country”.

Despite the USSR’s consequent breakup, almost two decades ago, the fallout is still being felt. The pricing and distribution of natural gas may be the weapon of choice for the big boys these days, but as the new order settles old scores, there’s still a role for bullets and bombs in the shadow world of the former empire .

I was recently at a conference in Cambridge devoted to the lengthy Cold War that preceded the post-’89 East-West rapprochement. A number of the ‘big players’ were there, from Eisenhower’s grandaughter to White House men who had served under Reagan, and Gorbachev’s former spokesman.

It was an impressive array of Cold War warriors, and enormously educational. But somewhere in the dissection of the whys and wherefores of this almighty clash of ideologies, something was lost. That something was the individual.

Looking back at what I have learned about the GDR, what really stands out for me are the stories of the little people. For example, the old lady in Leipzig who had marvelled at the people at the next restaurant table speaking French.

Or the woman who had a copy of the proscribed Gulag Archipelago for one night only and stayed up till morning to read it, before this ‘contraband’ had to be quickly passed on. Or the reckless 18-year-old who got himself arrested by the Stasi, gambling (correctly, as it happens) that West Germany would buy his release.

And of course the man at Bornholmer Strasse whose father died only months before 9th November 1989. Like my own grandmother, who served as a fire warden in the famously blitzed Coventry in WW2, these people’s names will not be found in any textbooks.

Like threads in the swirl of a pattern, their individual tales are lost in the grand design of the fabric of history. But put your face up to the canvas, look closely, and they’re there. They’re everywhere; the big narratives are but the sum of all their short stories. I salute them all.

This Friday will see the launch of city-lit Berlin at London’s Goethe Institute. The anthology is inspired by the atmospheric German capital which has captured so many writers’ imaginations – including mine.

I have been lucky enough to have some of my Berlin blogging included, alongside some pretty heavyweight names in modern literature. The book has been collecting great reviews, and my own modest contributions were singled out for praise in this FT review.

The 9th November anniversary celebrations in Berlin were nothing if not a spectacle. Brown, Merkel and Clinton gave speeches at the highly symbolic Brandenburg Gate that had lain in no man’s land during the Wall era. Gorbachev chatted to Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Lech Walesa broadcast live from the Reichstag.

Then 1,000 brightly-coloured ‘dominoes’ – each deliberately reminiscent of a section of the Berlin Wall and each decorated by artists or children – were toppled in a line that ran all the way from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate and almost the Reichstag. Fireworks lit up the sky over the Tiergarten to finish off the official commemoration on this cold and wet night.

Mission accomplished on Ebertstrasse.

But it was around 11pm that night at Bornholmer Strasse where a low-key sense of history could really be felt. Here, at around this this time of night 20 years ago, the border had given way: countless East Germans had heard the botched announcement about the lifting of travel restrictions and – only half-believing it – came to see if it was true.

As S-bahn trains rumbled underneath us, small groups were scattered along the pavement of the Bosebrucke bridge where tens of thousands of eager ‘Ossis’ had streamed across for a taste of what they had been denied so long. There was a murmur of conversation as paper cups were filled with wine and memories mulled over. Every so often a passing car tooted while candles glowed around the base of a monument commemorating the event, serving tonight as a focal point for another cluster of pensive drinkers.

This is where the people massed on the eastern side of the bridge.

A man sniffed, eyes moistening, as he explained in German how he had sat in a traffic jam here for hours that night. Only a few months beforehand his father had died, not living long enough to see this marvellous moment in modern German history. At moment that, he said, had actually been more emotional than his father’s death. He shook his head again and again, and said that he came here ever year. It was as if he couldn’t quite believe that it had all really happened.

Elsewhere, four women and a man made a toast. I asked them why they had chosen to be here, and not at the city centre razzmatazz? Two of the women had been 21-year-old Berliners in 1989, making the crossing here that extraordinary evening, and their friends had brought them here to remember it.

They struggled to articulate their feelings: “Er… toll (wonderful),” said one. “Ja, toll…” “Surprising!” offered the other. Growing up with Russian as a second language their English was very limited, so one of their friends from the former-West Germany translated what had happened:

“They were studying in Cottbus, two hours from here. They heard about what was happening here in Berlin – their home town – and said ‘It’s incredible, we have to check out if that is reality?’ They came straight to Berlin, and Bornholmer Strasse was the only place they could think to go. So they came here and it was open! They went to Ku’dam [W. Berlin’s Kurfurstendam] and it was really incredible.”

The five were all friends now; the three who had not lived in the GDR wanted to get a feel for how it must have been to be in the first wave across the bridge: “I said ‘I want to see the way you came to West Berlin 20 years ago. I want to translate that feeling for myself.’”

That feeling was still visible, as I walked across the bridge and back to the subway station, on the face of the man whose father had just missed the Wall’s demise. Even though he had been here at Bornholmer Strasse to enjoy it himself, be needed to stay a little longer to really believe it.

The Hammer & Sickle was on prominent display again last night in Berlin, but only as part of U2’s gig under the Brandenburg Gate. “Thanks for building the set,” Bono drily commented in their free pre-MTV European Music Awards show.

Album Achtung Baby was recorded at the time of reunification (1990) at the famous Hansa studios near the Wall, and their Zoo TV stage show took diminutive GDR Trabi’s and mounted them on stages around the world.

U2 always have an eye for the moment. The gate was hugely symbolic long before the Wall made it off limits in ’61, so this spot at the end of the Unter Den Linden was the perfect place to mark the anniversary of Berlin’s (latest) rebirth.

As Jay-Z guested on anthem Sunday Bloody Sunday at one of Europe’s most famous landmarks – under the quadriga that depicts the chariot-riding Roman goddess of victory – it became a giant video screen while searchlights touched the clouds and made patterns in the black November sky.

“Thanks for coming out on a cold night,” said Bono. It was worth it for a little piece of history.

At a recent workshop given by volunteers from London’s arts radio station Resonance FM, they were at pains to point out that silence is not always a bad thing. A short pause can sometimes say much more than a hundred words ever could.

I was reminded of this comment today in the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen. The guided tour had ended and, as it grew dark outside, I was left alone on the 2nd floor of the interrogation block. Door after brown padded door lined either side of this long corridor till the dark lines they made converged like rail tracks or cross hairs.

This is where disoriented prisoners were brought – one at a time so as not to pass anyone on the way – to meet their one source of human contact: their interrogation officer. Listening to the litany of offences against human decency the guide reeled off, a sense of revulsion welled up inside; coupled with the uncomfortable thought that sensory deprivation and water torture in unknown locations still goes on today. And sometimes closer to home than we’d like to think: ‘extraordinary rendition’ has a much nicer ring to it than kidnapping, though.

Shocking though they were, the allegations of forced-abortion and exposure to deadly X-rays were almost superfluous: given the exent of the methodical application of more mundane methods of destroying the individual. Dissenters and would-be escapees to the West were more commonly crushed by the application of mental cruelty, under the guise of ‘operative psychology’.

But what lingers now in the memory is that silence; a silence that was not even broken by a buzz from those harsh fluorescent lights; a silence so intense you could hear the hum of your brain’s electrical impulses in between your ears.

Minutes seemed like hours. What must have it been like to endure that for days, weeks and sometimes years? Not knowing where you were, even the guard walked behind you to avoid the tiniest trace of a relationship or connection that eye contact might constitute.

Stepping through the iron gates and out of the claustrophobic grey courtyard, I walked back along the snowy Freienwalder Strasse to the M5 tram stop. Passing a warm and fully stocked supermarket, orange light spilled from snug-looking apartments with lacey curtains and I wondered who lived there. Or more pertinently, who they were and how they lived with themselves?

Of the 91,000 full-time Stasi, 20 people had been prosecuted after the Wall came down. Many of them are living comfortably in that same area; some are doctors and lawyers; most refuse to apologise. And so for the ex-prisoners who lead the tours of this once-secret dungeon, any acknowledgement of wrongdoing they seek must come from tourists and not torturers. ‘Sorry’ is not a word that comes easily to Stasi lips.